After years of promising investors that millions of Tesla robotaxis would soon fill the streets, Elon Musk debuted his driverless car service in a limited public rollout in Austin, Texas. It did not go smoothly.
The 22 June launch initially appeared successful enough, with a flood of videos from pro-Tesla social media influencers praising the service and sharing footage of their rides. Musk celebrated it as a triumph, and the following day, Tesla’s stock rose nearly 10%.
What quickly became apparent, however, was that the same influencer videos Musk promoted also depicted the self-driving cars appearing to break traffic laws or struggle to properly function. By Tuesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had opened an investigation into the service and requested information from Tesla on the incidents.
Let me tell you how thrilled we all are to have a new hazard added to Austin streets.
Our eyes are not perfect organs so why pretend like they are? Our eyes fail us:
- when it’s too dark
- when it’s too bright
- when there’s fog
- when there’s too much rain and snow
- when there’s glare from the sun
- when there’s obstructions
- when there’s sensory overload
- when there’s something covering our eyes like dirt and mud
- when we can only see on the visible spectrum
Why wouldn’t we want more incoming data to account for these shortcomings? Optical-only vision-based solutions are incomplete because our eyes are incomplete. I can’t see that a car is stopped dead in the road 10 feet ahead of me in thick fog, but an advanced set of telemetry sensors can. My eyes are not better than the scores of technology we’ve built over the past few decades and I’ve been practicing with them for 46 years. Give me a helmet that includes LIDAR and infrared and night vision and sonar and telemetry from a satellite and GPS and weather tracking and god knows what else and I’ll be much less likely to rear end that car in the fog. We humans invent technology to make up for our shortcomings, so why go with the idea of “if it’s good enough for biological evolution it’s good enough for these multi-ton contraptions we have hurtling down highways next to each other several metres apart at 100 km per hour every second of every day?” It sounds ludicrous on its face. We can choke on a peanut because our swallow tube is the next to the breathing tube ffs. We can do better.
Yeah, the “appeal to nature” fallacy that Musk is using is really dangerous. I want the best tools that are practical for the job, since this has actual life and death consequences. A mix of sensors that work together and covers each others limitations.
People built houses before hammers were invented. But that’s sort of the point of tools: that they can do things more efficiently than we can.
“LIDAR is so lame! Who needs to be able to accurately map their surroundings, when our cars can get confused by a shadow passing across one of their lenses, just like humans do? It’s so much more efficient to be blinded by fog, or low light conditions.”
- Moron Musk, for some reason.
Someone who thinks laser is lame is a huge moron. Case in point.
Other end of the scale: styropyro
Unless we figure out who would “personally” be liable when an accident happen we should not have any self driving cars on the street.
Right now if someone crash into my car I know who is liable.
If self driving car crash into my car, are you telling me to sue Tesla? Lol, as if that is feasible.
With good integrated design, the LIDAR could be practically invisible. So weird to think the average person actually would care about the details of how something works, or maybe Elon Musk just literally cannot imagine a car that uses LIDAR without it having a big assembly on the roof.
This has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with reducing production costs. The sensors themselves add to costs, but then the data processing for all of this data adds to the computational needs of the system, sensor installs requiring calibration and flexibility for changes in sensors add costs. The list goes on.
Musk and Tesla are standing firm on their position that LiDAR is needless and that others will follow their lead here, but so far in practice the lack of LiDAR in Tesla vehicles has shown to be a serious disadvantage compared to other systems.
Compared to the Cybertruck’s design, I don’t think having a LIDAR antenna on top of the car is so bad.
Yep, I used to work for a robotics company that makes self-navigating floor cleaning robots. The LIDAR is completely integrated into the housing of the robot in both the old designs and the new one; it’s barely noticeable.
I also much prefer my robot to not send a live camera feed to some Chinese server. So even if Lidar were to be less good I’d opt for that.
Looking at their recent facelifts, I don’t think they have many good designers left
I have a theory on this. They use a lot of ML for FSD and Ap. That a radical redesign would change the model enough that they would have to retrain from scratch. So they keep the facelifts extremely minor .
Just a theory.
Tesla’s used to have LiDAR - they turned them off in software and stopped adding them to newer models.
A long time ago Elon promised that full self-driving would be coming to existing cars that had their self-driving package installed which was cameras only. Elon is probably sticking with cameras only to avoid a lawsuit.
They stuck the model Y’s new added front camera right under the “grille” shape (where the black trim ends and body colored panels begin), so the rest of it being so bland doesn’t have an excuse. The rest of it’s front cameras are under the front glass, they could at least make an interesting fascia, even if they had to keep the dimensions roughly the same
Always interesting to see the view of the degree of Elon Musk’s involvement in his companies’ decisions swing depending on whether the outcome is good or bad.
His particular degree of involvement in this decision has been well documented for years, long before the consequences of those decisions.
https://insideevs.com/news/658439/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-autopilot-engineers-radar-removal/
Sure, not disputing that. I’m more annoyed by the double standard regarding his successful decisions.
Not sure what you mean. He’s always been pretty involved in Tesla designs.
What I mean is that when Musk-owned companies have successes people are very often quick to accuse him of “just hiring smart people” or “just buying a successful company.” It’s only when those companies have failures that he gets credit for being hands-on in their design decisions.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Elon Musk is a pretty terrible person both in terms of his personality and his politics. But pretty terrible people can nevertheless be smart and make good engineering decisions. Just look at von Braun as a prime example.
I think it is more nuanced than that. He has had a variable amount of involvement in multiple companies throughout the years, and noting when something is or is not his fault is not a bad thing.
Like I said before, he has been pretty heavily involved in Tesla since he bought the company. He notably makes a lot of decisions. SpaceX, on the other hand, is notably run by Gwynne Shotwell for a majority of decisions. He has made some design decisions, but he is pretty checked out on the day to day.
I don’t think he was never a good engineer, but I think he has not done it in so long, that he has lost those skills. Also, if the alleged amount of ketamine he does is even kind of accurate, that does not help make good decisions. He also has almost nobody he will listen to. We can see all that reflected in the decline of good ideas coming out of Tesla (again, the company he is most involved in).
Calling Musk an engineer is like saying the same about Steve Jobs. Both are(/were) salesmen happy to claim credit for every success while delegating blame for problems.
Not that this is unique to the pair in the current climate of people believing in messianic oligarchs, but I’m not really aware of any boots-on-the-ground innovation that sprang forth from Musk’s mind. The Cybertruck is a fucking joke, and that seems to be the thing at Tesla he was most involved in of late, then broke the windows during a demo.
Leave breaking Windows at a keynote to Steve Ballmer.
I think at one point he was a software engineer. I don’t he has been that for a long time, though. This is also probably not true any longer, but he did have a knack for spotting up and coming companies and buying them.
The Cybertruck is definitely the epitome of Musk’s current “skills”
It’s entirely possible he was responsible for some of PayPal, but since, his MO has been, as you said, buying up promising companies. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when he rewrites history to be the founder instead of simply an investor in these firms and claims credit for shit he simply didn’t do.
I fell for it myself for a while. Early days of Tesla, early days of SpaceX … dude knows how to sell and arguably accelerated BEVs, but it appears he doesn’t know how to actually carve tunnels or rewrite mass transit with functionally unlimited money. Not to mention, Starship is having a really bad time these days, which stands in stark contrast to how banal Falcon launches have become.
Oh for sure, back when all he said was “here all of Tesla’s patents. Feel free to use them” I also fell for it. I honestly don’t think his views were any different, he just kept his mouth shut
The company has not released information on whether, or how long, it has spent mapping out or testing the driverless technology on Austin’s streets.
That’s being too nice, the CEO is clearly proud of not mapping cities, as seen in the tweets. The journalist should call it out explicitly. “They are probably not mapping as suggested by the CEO’s public posts.” That’s not too much of a leap.
